MONTREAL — It’s difficult to imagine a central banker as a rock star, but that’s what Mark Carney has become in his 4½ years as governor of the Bank of Canada.

At international conferences, from the G20 to Davos, Carney and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty were major players, not because of the offices they held but because of the story they had to tell, of steering Canada safely through the financial crisis of 2008-09.

In spite of stimulus spending to get through the Great Recession, Canada has by far the lowest deficit- and debt-to-GDP ratios of any G7 country. Inflation has fallen from just under two per cent when Carney took office to just over one per cent today. Canada has the best job-creation rate since 2008 of any G7 country with the exception of Germany. All the jobs lost in the recession have been replaced, and then some.

And then there’s the Canadian banking system, ranked strongest in the world for the last five years by the World Economic Forum. The Big Five Canadian Banks all rank in the Top 10 in North America in terms of assets and market cap. At the bottom of the recession in 2009, Flaherty put $150 billion of standby credit aside for the banks, and they never took a nickel of it. Nor did they ever miss a dividend payment.

That may be because they weren’t carrying toxic assets on their books, derivatives, sub-prime mortgages and the like. Carney knows this complex world from his years as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs in London and New York.

As associate deputy minister of finance under the Martin government, he was a logical candidate to become deputy minister under the Conservatives. When that didn’t happen, Flaherty pushed hard for his appointment to the Bank instead. Which proved to be providential, in view of the crash of October 2008, only six months after he was named governor.

Carney and his colleagues, notably Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve in the U.S., aggressively intervened to pump liquidity into their economies by lowering interest rates to near zero, and using every instrument of monetary policy at their disposal.

In the close circle of G7 and G20 finance ministers and central bankers, Carney’s flair caught the attention of his colleagues, notably for his creativity and persuasiveness. A year ago, Carney was named head of the Financial Stability Board, the G20’s oversight committee on banking and finance. This part-time role was another line in Carney’s international resumé. He would have been a natural candidate to head one of the international financial institutions, except that since their founding, the World Bank has always been led by an American, while the International Monetary Fund has always been headed by a European, with neither the Americans nor the Europeans likely to relinquish their control of either.

Which meant that in terms of what he might do next at age 47, Carney would have to look elsewhere. About six months ago, he was rumoured to be shortlisted to succeed Mervyn King as governor of the Bank of England. Asked about this at the time, Carney said he looked forward to talking to the next head of the Bank of England.

Which turns out to be him.

Announcing his appointment in the mother of all parliaments on Monday, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne called Carney the outstanding central banker of his generation and said: “He is quite simply the best, most experienced and most qualified person in the world to do this job.”

From London, as Carney and Flaherty both noted, he’ll be able to keep a closer eye on the euro crisis, to say nothing of the challenges in British banking and markets, in an economy just coming out of a double-dip recession.

And while he’s technically a foreigner, a first for the Bank of England, it’s not as if he doesn’t know the place. He did his master’s and doctorate in economics at Oxford, where he met his British wife, Diana, mother of their four daughters. He worked in the City, London’s financial district, for seven years. The Brits are lucky to be getting him, and they know it.

Carney apparently represents a trend to reverse colonialism in high places in London. First, Moya Greene, head of Canada Post, was named head of the Royal Mail in 2010. And now Carney to the Bank of England.

A girl from Newfoundland, and a boy from Fort Smith in the Northwest Territories. It’s a remarkable journey for both of them, and it says something about the quality of the Canadian public service that the British are stealing our best people.

L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Inside Policy, the magazine of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

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